SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering
arXiv:2510.20889 · doi:10.1103/1gpp-3tqd
Abstract
Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth's atmosphere and crust before reaching an underground detector. This Earth-shielding effect can induce a directional dependence in the dark matter flux, leading to a sidereal daily modulation in the signal rate. We perform a search for such a modulation using data from the SENSEI experiment, targeting MeV-scale dark matter. We achieve an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over previous direct-detection bounds for dark-matter masses below 1 MeV, assuming the Standard Halo Model with a Maxwell--Boltzmann velocity distribution, and constrain the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 electrons per gram per day.
arXiv comment6 pages, 3, figures, + Supplemental Materials (4 pages, 4 figures) + References
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